Perl has a lovely little utility called find2perl that will translate (quite faithfully) a command line for the Unix find utility into a Perl script to do the same.

If you have a find command like this:

find /usr -xdev -type d -name '*share'

                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^  => name with shell expansion of '*share'
                 ^^^^ => Directory (not a file)
           ^^^ => Do not go to external file systems
     ^^^ => the /usr directory (could be multiple directories

It finds all the directories ending in share below /usr

Now run find2perl /usr -xdev -type d -name '*share' and it will emit a Perl script to do the same. You can then modify the script to your use.

Python has os.walk() which certainly has the needed functionality, recursive directory listing, but there are big differences.

Take the simple case of find . -type f -print to find and print all files under the current directory. A naïve implementation using os.walk() would be:

for path, dirs, files in os.walk(root):
    if files:
        for file in files:
            print os.path.join(path,file)

However, this will produce different results than typing find . -type f -print in the shell.

I have also been testing various os.walk() loops against:

# create pipe to 'find' with the commands with arg of 'root'
find_cmd='find %s -type f' % root
args=shlex.split(find_cmd)
p=subprocess.Popen(args,stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
out,err=p.communicate()    
out=out.rstrip()            # remove terminating \n
for line in out.splitlines()
   print line

The difference is that os.walk()

python find os.walk
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